In the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, the expansion of soy is not only transforming landscapes but also suffocating the communities that inhabit them. The intensive use of herbicides in soybean plantations -- particularly glyphosate -- has deeply disrupted the dynamics that sustain life in Amazonian communities and their relationship with the land.
These findings come from a recent ethnographic study based on long-term immersion in everyday life and in-depth interviews with residents of the Lower Tapajós, in Pará. The results were published last September in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.
Through the community's critical narratives, it was possible to expose how respiratory impacts and experiences of suffocation among this population lead to a slow and prolonged process of expulsion. This mechanism acts simultaneously on bodies, ecosystems, and the very possibility of remaining in their territories.
The situation was described bluntly, in just a few words, by Beto, a rural worker from a riverine community along the Curuá-Una highway in Pará. "It's suffocating!" he said, referring to the reasons behind the successive forced displacements he has experienced since the early 2000s, when soy first arrived in Santarém, Pará.
Beto's account -- his name was changed to protect his safety and confidentiality -- is part of the detailed research I conducted in the region between 2019 and 2022. His story condenses the experience of thousands of other rural workers who have been forced to leave their lands due to soy expansion -- a reality repeated across other parts of Brazil.
Grounded in 18 months of fieldwork, I developed the concept of expulsion by suffocation to describe how the expansion of soybean plantations, driven by glyphosate use, has been transforming the lives of communities in the Brazilian Amazon.
The study argues that glyphosate use produces a slow form of chemical violence that suffocates people, ecosystems, and ways of life. This violence forces riverine communities to leave and clears the way for soy's advance, also harming Indigenous and quilombola populations.
A trail of destruction
A producer of papaya, cupuaçu, soursop, passion fruit, and manioc, Beto used to take pride in not using agrochemicals. But he now fears he can no longer guarantee an organic harvest. "The wind carries the glyphosate," he says, with melancholy. Other farmers reported that with the application of poison on the monoculture fields, they too were forced to use it on their own crops -- otherwise, they simply wouldn't grow.
"Their goal today is to advance," warns Beto, referring to the dynamics that allow soy producers to gain ground over the forest, occupying already-cleared areas and traditional communities. Having lived for 25 years in communities along the Curuá-Una highway, Beto has seen himself surrounded by soy. As the plantations advanced, the encirclement grew, and eventually, he had nowhere left to go to continue his agricultural work.
Besieged by a property larger than his own and with his income affected by the constant application of poison, the only option that seemed viable was to sell his land to the soy producers and move to the city. To him, the remaining patches of forest and the houses of roadside communities appeared as a farce, concealing the vast expanse of soy fields behind and the violent process of territorial transformation he had witnessed.
The rapid advance of soybean fields over the forest in the Lower Tapajós region (Pará) has led to the devastation of vast areas and the forced displacement of traditional communities. Photo: Bruno Kelly.
In the entire Lower Tapajós region, testimonies abound from people who say they cannot breathe during herbicide spraying, which respects neither days nor hours. These situations often force residents to lock themselves indoors.
In some cases, the feeling of asphyxiation is so intense that it triggers anxiety attacks. Even schools are not immune to these impacts, which affect children even during class hours, as witnessed at the Vitalina Motta Municipal School in the municipality of Belterra.
Although such accounts are numerous and symptoms recurrent, one of the main points debated in the specialized literature concerns the difficulty of proving a causal link between exposure to a particular chemical agent and the harm inflicted on a specific body or community.
Frequent and long-term exposure, combined with the rapid dispersion of glyphosate through the air, soil, and water sources -- as well as its interaction with other factors that cause illnesses -- makes its effects difficult to trace. In short, pesticides are elusive.
Taking advantage of this elusive correlation, powerful local actors aligned with agribusiness argue that there is no evidence that the herbicide harms human health when used at the so-called correct dose.
Moreover, there is an intentional underreporting of cases, as these political groups pressure health teams not to record acute pesticide poisoning. Faced with both the difficulty of proving the effects and the official underreporting, the research sought alternative ways to delineate this relationship.
In search of evidence, the study interviewed medical professionals working in the region, whose contributions helped connect observed clinical manifestations to the environmental and social context of affected communities.
The work also incorporated studies from the medical field that, although still limited, expand the scientific recognition of this reality. Together with the communities' narratives, these data sustain the concept of expulsion by suffocation and help elucidate the multidimensional harms involved in the agroindustrial takeover of the forest.
The creation of demographic voids
By recognizing that the emptiness into which soy expands is itself produced by suffocation, it becomes necessary to situate these processes within the broader historical and political trajectory of the Brazilian Amazon.
This study makes it possible to connect recent transformations in the Lower Tapajós to the long history of Amazonian occupation. A trajectory that was marked by military modernization projects implemented on a previously unprecedented scale beginning in the late 1960s. These initiatives, promoted by Brazil's military dictatorship (1964-1985), were founded on the premise that the forest was a vast demographic void awaiting productive use.
But the notion of an "empty Amazon" emerged before the military dictatorship and, throughout the twentieth century, guided policies of occupation and control over Indigenous territories. Since 1910, with the creation of the Indian Protection Service (SPI), the Brazilian state has sought to integrate Indigenous peoples into the national project under a discourse of pacification that disguises the violence of territorial expansion.
From initiatives such as the March to the West (1930-45), and the National Integration Plan (1970), the latter during the dictatorship, to the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC, 2007) and the Belo Monte dam (2016) under democracy, successive governments have consolidated a developmentalist model sustained by major infrastructure projects, deforestation, and expulsions.
The intensive use of pesticides in the Lower Tapajós can be seen as one of the most recent chapters in this counter-history of Brazil, as proposed by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who suggests that the country's history should be understood as a long process of expulsion and violence aimed at the expropriation of Indigenous lands.
In this sense, pesticides operate as a political technology that materializes the colonial imaginary of an "empty Amazon" to be transformed. Expulsion by suffocation in the Lower Tapajós thus sheds light on a persistent historical reality: the Amazon forest was never empty, but rather, certain actors have actively produced emptiness in parts of the forest through agroindustrial practices that depend precisely on this emptied space to advance.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.